The present invention relates to techniques for providing embedded commercial offers. More specifically, the present invention relates to dynamic commercial offers that are embedded in or associated with financial software.
Targeted advertising, in which advertisements and/or commercial offers are provided to customers who are interested in specific products, is becoming an important marketing paradigm. For example, many companies obtain new customers and increase their revenue by providing targeted advertising via the Internet. These advertisements are targeted to specific users based on factors, such as key words in a search query entered by a user, content on a web page being viewed by a user, and/or user preferences. Such factors are indicative of current interests of prospective customers, and thus, increase the relevancy of the advertisements.
Unfortunately, these factors are an indirect indicator of the current interests of the prospective customers. Consequently, the customer capture rate associated with many targeted advertisements remains relatively low.
One approach for improving the relevancy of the advertisements is to determine the interests of the prospective customers based on their past behavior, and in particular, their past purchasing behavior. Presumably, items that customers previously purchased are good predictors of their future interests, and thus, their future purchasing behavior.
However, this approach is often limited in scope, because commercial establishments typically only have access to a limited subset of a customer's purchasing behavior. For example, once the need for a particular item is fulfilled (the customer has just purchase the item), providing advertising for the same item or additional products closely related to the item may be less effective because in the immediate future. This type of pattern becomes more evident when a cumulative history of the customer's purchasing behavior is analyzed, but less evident when only a small sample of the customer's purchasing behavior is considered.
Moreover, many advertisements are also time dependent. For example, a commercial offer may only be valid for a limited time to limit the financial liability associated with the commercial offer and in an attempt to motivate potential customers to make a purchase sooner as opposed to later. However, many existing advertisements are presented in a static format, which may not fully convey an urgency associated with their time dependence.
Therefore, the efficacy of many existing advertisements is limited by a lack of information about a customer's overall purchasing behavior and/or by the use of formats that do not convey the time dependence of these advertisements.